This Tender Place: The Story of a Wetland Year - Book

In This Tender Place: The Story of a Wetland Year- After the deaths of her father and father-in-law, author Laurie Lawlor and her family move to the country and found a "rustic" home in the wetlands of southeast Wisconsin. There she discovers an unlikely place for healing and transformation-a landscape of abundant and sometimes inaccessible beauty that has often been ignored, misunderstood, and threatened by human destruction. In her decade-long personal wetland journey, she examines the sky, delves underwater, and peers between sedges in all seasons and all times of day.

This Tender Place is a celebration of nature, the elements, and humanity. From the wetland's genesis during the ice age to its survival in the twenty-first century, Lawlor chronicles the universal ties among people, wild places, and healthy wetlands. An engaging and deeply intimate record, This Tender Place is at its heart a story of refuge and renewal refracted through the lens of life within wetlands-among the most productive, yet most endangered, ecosystems in the world.

Laurie Lawlor is the author of thirty-three books for children and adults, among them Addie Across the Prairie and Window on the West: The Frontier Photography of William Henry Jackson. Her books have received several accolades including the Carl Sandburg Award for Children's Literature, the Golden Kite Honor Book for Nonfiction award, and the American Library Association Best Books for Young Adults award. She teaches writing at Columbia College in Chicago.

This Tender Place: The Story of a Wetland Year has been selected for Outstanding Achievement recognition by the Wisconsin Library Association Literary Awards Committee. The award is given to books published in 2005 judged on their literary merit as well as the quality of the writing, editing, and printing.